Margot Asquith
May. 16th, 2022 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bouzygesWhile there is not among the long list of decorative names of 'gallants and graces', of 'souls and spirits', one who can be said to have produced off his own bat anything remotely satisfying to spirit and soul, each of the participants was a day-dreaming artist cherishing his own vision of incommunicable beauty, imbued in addition with a certain general Schwärmerei for the things of the spirit and the mind.
Margot was, of course, there. She was at once Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. At the time of this avowedly Heartbreak House banquet she was in the very trough of her romance with Peter Flower, a thorough-going Horseback Hall follower to hounds: a romance described by her with such painstaking care not to tread on her own corns. This chapter in her book, far from being the reckless dance of self-abandon she would like it to be, gives the impression rather of a cat stepping over hot bricks.
For our vanity is, alas, our private Golgotha. Mrs. Asquith is determined to cut a dashing, romantic, as well as sensible, high-principled, earnest, cultured, profound and charitable, but wittily incisive, wickedly epigrammatic, though sweetly forgiving, and, if mundane, also deeply-religious, at once spirituelle and spiritual, meditative, Christian figure. And she is satisfied that the reader will take her at her own valuation.
It would indeed be surprising if we did not find her in this assembly of sportsmen and men and women of political action assembled to convince themselves that they were also artists and creatures of thought. In her we indeed get both sides of the British apple. Impulsive, generous and compassionate, spontaneous and warm-hearted, acute in comment, "the type it reveals," as Middleton Murry wrote when reviewing her autobiography in the Nation, "is not very intriguing." Katherine Mansfield, perhaps a little uneasy lest her own absent Jack might succumb to the social blandishments of Mrs. Asquith basking in the fame of her autobiography, confessed in a letter penned in exile from the south of France that for her own part she didn't care a Farthing Taster whether Margot made her horse walk upstairs or downstairs or in my lady's chamber. To her, a sensitive writer, to analyse the specimen revealed was like trying to operate on a deceased mind by cutting open a brain. "You may remove every trace of anything that shouldn't be there and make no end of a job of it and then in her case, in the case of all such women - the light comes back into the patient's eyes and with the vaguest of vague elusive maddening smiles... Do you know what I mean? Here's, I think, the root of the matter. What is Insensitiveness? We know or we could find out by examination what it is not, but it seems to me the quality hasn't been discovered yet. I mean it's x - it's a subject for research. It most certainly isn't only the lack of certain qualities: it's a kind of positive unknown."
From God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie
Margot was, of course, there. She was at once Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. At the time of this avowedly Heartbreak House banquet she was in the very trough of her romance with Peter Flower, a thorough-going Horseback Hall follower to hounds: a romance described by her with such painstaking care not to tread on her own corns. This chapter in her book, far from being the reckless dance of self-abandon she would like it to be, gives the impression rather of a cat stepping over hot bricks.
For our vanity is, alas, our private Golgotha. Mrs. Asquith is determined to cut a dashing, romantic, as well as sensible, high-principled, earnest, cultured, profound and charitable, but wittily incisive, wickedly epigrammatic, though sweetly forgiving, and, if mundane, also deeply-religious, at once spirituelle and spiritual, meditative, Christian figure. And she is satisfied that the reader will take her at her own valuation.
It would indeed be surprising if we did not find her in this assembly of sportsmen and men and women of political action assembled to convince themselves that they were also artists and creatures of thought. In her we indeed get both sides of the British apple. Impulsive, generous and compassionate, spontaneous and warm-hearted, acute in comment, "the type it reveals," as Middleton Murry wrote when reviewing her autobiography in the Nation, "is not very intriguing." Katherine Mansfield, perhaps a little uneasy lest her own absent Jack might succumb to the social blandishments of Mrs. Asquith basking in the fame of her autobiography, confessed in a letter penned in exile from the south of France that for her own part she didn't care a Farthing Taster whether Margot made her horse walk upstairs or downstairs or in my lady's chamber. To her, a sensitive writer, to analyse the specimen revealed was like trying to operate on a deceased mind by cutting open a brain. "You may remove every trace of anything that shouldn't be there and make no end of a job of it and then in her case, in the case of all such women - the light comes back into the patient's eyes and with the vaguest of vague elusive maddening smiles... Do you know what I mean? Here's, I think, the root of the matter. What is Insensitiveness? We know or we could find out by examination what it is not, but it seems to me the quality hasn't been discovered yet. I mean it's x - it's a subject for research. It most certainly isn't only the lack of certain qualities: it's a kind of positive unknown."
From God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie